” What Do All These Words Mean !!!”
It can be confusing right? You’re taking an email marketing course and the guy (err umm me) who created it starts popping off with words like ESP and CTR and Bounce Rate and you’re like WHAT? Yeah that’s difficult no doubt so I wanted to make sure that I gave you a resource here to simply show you “here’s what all this stuff means” and it’s a place you can frequently come back to if you get stuck or happen to forget something.
A/B Split Test – This simply refers to “testing” two different email creatives to your list. You’re splitting it 50/50 to see which one gets the better response rate and statistics.
Ad Swap – This is where two email marketers agree to send emails to each others offers or “squeeze pages”. This helps you build your list without spending money on subscriber acquisition.
Auto-Responder – This is an email that “automatically” goes out to someone on your list. It’s typically activated by someone “subscribing” to the list, although there are other options to activate an auto response message. Typically mailers have a complete “sequence” of emails that are sent to their subscribers over a certain period of time.
Bounced Email – This is an email that is not delivered. There are 2 types of bounces soft and hard. Soft bounces are emails that are not delivered to real email addresses and are less problematic. Hard bounces are typically spam traps or invalid email addresses. Having a large % of hard bounces is very bad and can result in your sending account being shut down.
Call To Action – Also known as CTA is simply the part of an email that tells the user to “take action” and click on the link provided in the email creative.
CTR – This is your CLICK THROUGH RATIO it’s just the amount of times someone clicks on your links in your email vs the amount you have sent out. We often times check our CTR in two different ways:
– The % of people who clicked based on the “Open Rate #”
– The % of people who clicked based on the total amount of mail sent.
Creative – This is simply an emails written copy and graphics. It’s in a sense the message you are sending.
Double opt-in: A process that requires new list joiners to take an action (such as clicking on an emailed link to a personal confirmation page) in order to confirm that they do want to be on the list. If double opt-in is turned on when you acquire subscribers you are unable to send emails to anyone who doesn’t click on the confirmation link sent to them.
List fatigue: A condition producing diminishing returns from a mailing list whose members are sent too many offers, or too many of the same offers, in too short a period of time.
List hygiene: The process of maintaining a list so that hard bounces and unsubscribed names are removed from mailings. This keeps your list fresh and responsive.
Open Rate – This is just the number of people who opened an email you’ve sent divided by the number of total emails sent out. This is one of the key factors we look at when determining if our mailing strategy is working.
Opt-out: A request to remove an email address from a specific list, campaign or account.
Personalization: A optimization method in which an email message looks to have been created only for a single recipient. Personalization techniques include adding the recipient’s name in the subject line or email message. You can also include the recipient’s email address, location or any other valid information to make the email “personalized”.
Seed emails: Email addresses placed on a list to determine what messages are sent to the list and/or to track delivery rate and/or visible appearance of delivered messages. In our training we talk extensively about seed email lists and how they can increase your open rates.
Unsubscribe: To remove yourself from an email list. Typically all emails have an “unsubscribe” link located at the bottom of them.
